[Python-Dev] timemodule.c, 2.140 (original) (raw)

Brett C. bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU
Sat Jul 24 20:48:35 CEST 2004

Tim Peters wrote:

[Jp Calderone]

time.strftime() in 2.4a0 places more restrictions on its inputs than does the version in 2.3.x. Revision 2.140 seems to be where this was introduced.

I believe it is a common use of strftime() to fill out only some fields of the time tuple. Requiring the day of year and day of week is particularly burdensome. I have real code that will not work at all on Python 2.4 because of this. Is there any possiblity of the restriction being removed? Yes, but the likelihood would zoom if you opened a bug report about it. This is what alpha releases are for. IIRC, the change was to prevent core dumps on some platforms in some cases. The sooner you file that bug report , the better the chance somone can volunteer enough time to make you happy without reintroducing crashes.

Yeah, that fix was introduced to prevent core dumps when bad info was used (usually from using a value that was outside the bounds of something, such as a negative, and that leading to indexing outside the array's actual size). See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-February/042675.html for the thread that came up with this solution (which Guido okayed).

-Brett

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